The Peren ghost

A dead Peren man in a cloak so deep a green it was nearly black, hood up, long silvered hair beneath it, eyes gone faded, skin worn past weathering. He leaned on a plain walking stick and, when he had been standing a while, on the wall behind him. Whatever part of him was moving fastest tended to flicker out of the world for a moment and come back.

He was in every one of the seven keeps, and he is the reason anyone knows what the keeps are. He guided whoever came to break them.

The Name

He is called Nancáro, and that came from the Martyr’s messenger rather than from him: brother to Vëné, cursed alongside her, aligned to death and negative energy.

He never confirmed it. Asked directly, what he gave back was that his name was something still lost to him, and that there was a familiarity to that one. Asked again a season later he had no opinion yet. Everyone went on using it anyway, and everyone was right to. What walked the keeps was a shadow of the god who holds that name, and a shadow has no better claim on it than a familiarity.

Who Can See Him

Koa saw him, and that was true from the first, in the mountain keep, when only Koa could see and only Mikhail, on thin Peren blood, could hear.

It moved about after that. For a stretch Aldo could do both, and lost it entirely when the ooze was cut out of him. Later the Elder found he could throw a mirrored image of himself so all three could see, which he was careful to distinguish from the real thing: Koa was seeing him; the others were being shown a copy of exactly what he was doing. Whether the hired woodsman Dwayne ever perceived him at all was told both ways and never settled.

What He Knows and What It Costs Him

He arrived feeble and has not stayed that way. He was sharper in the sludge-keep under Haudh-Gwenn, where he explained how a keep binds a great elemental through crystals cut at the boundary between worlds. At the Twisted Grove the party found him pinned to the wall by the death-tree’s roots, and once he was free he set out the two trees, the link between them, and a good deal of the shape of the planes. By the Wraithblade keep he was visibly less withered and pushed off the wall with real strength.

Then he spent it. To carry the company, their animals and an unconscious captive to the Twisted Grove for its crystal, he bridged the two keeps’ map rooms through the ethereal, working from the map room because that was where he was strongest, and warning them first that it would cost him heavily. It drained him to transparency. Charging a crystal at the last left him, in the plainest account anyone gave, a withered mess and fading fast.

His grief could surge into something frightening.

One thing he said is disputed by people who ought to know. He gave the Peren as engineered slaves of the Empire who rose against it. The textbooks of Peredhel, which is a nation of Peren, record no such thing. Leon raised that to his face and the room had no answer.

Campaign Updates

He recovered. Two days after the charging he was a husk, and under Aldo’s questioning he gave up what he had been holding back: that something ancient and dreaming lies under Haudh-Gwenn, kept down for years by the Slumbering Queen and by a second presence he could never see clearly and which is now gone; and that the curse on that keep had fired five times, the original fall and four failed breakings run under his own guidance. He took the unused conditional curse back out of Aldo’s hand, which visibly restored him, and then pulled Beltran’s shade out of the Wraithblade to question it, because every master of that blade joins its ranks at death.

Then he did the thing he had promised and dreaded. He opened one keep’s map room onto another twice in a morning, carrying three separate parties, their horses and their barrels of oil from Wraithblade to Haudh-Gwenn to the Twisted Grove, and came out of it about as diminished as the fourth or fifth time they ever met him rather than the wreck everyone had braced for. He walked out into the Grove with them, put an aura of imperceptibility over Mikhail at a cost he said aloud he was wearing himself thin for, and swept the blights back with the last of it when the death-tree’s roots came down.

Three keeps broke inside four minutes at dawn, and the overarching curse over Idir broke with them. That curse had been his prison. What rose out of the ground in the courtyard afterwards was younger than any of them had ever seen him, moved with an unearthly glide, and did not know them at all: We’ve never properly met before. At least, I’ve never properly met you before. The Elder had been a shadow of him, and the whole of him is Nancáro.

He paid what he owed. Koa held him to the promise about the woman who wakes in Gwen’s body and got his answer within the hour: she is Gwen’s own dreams, made flesh by the thing buried under Haudh-Gwenn. The help he asked for in return, for Al-Sāmiyah, is still owed him, and the company turned west for her mountain. The curse he set in Aldo’s hand, keyed to Beltran alone and delivered by touch, was never used.